9.27.2008

Last night Kelly Holt and I raced from a tasty meal at Crepevine where we were discussing Jack Spicer and Nathaniel Mackey, to Small Press Traffic to hear Aaron Shurin, Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye read and perform. Autumn has begun its reign and so it was already dark as we slipped in at about 7:45.

Aaron read first.It has been a long time since I've heard him, though I've always loved Shurin's work and years ago sent him a copy of my first chapbook. I believe he sent a little missive in return and I wonder where that note is now.

But back to the evening's events-- I was mesmerized by Aaron's sonorous voice and beautifully paced reading. He read from his new collection of personal essays King of Shadows. These pieces are as much about Shurin's love affair with the glittering city by the Bay as they are about his passion for literature and language and the city's nascent (in the mid 1960s) and ever evolving gay scene.

Here's a gem from "In the Bars of Heaven and Hell," a piece he read from last night:

"...Imaginary metropolis, fleur de ciel, balm for a wound and the wound's own inflamer, city of promise or pleasure or pain, city of the heathenly heavenly gate, city of all gratification given or lost in place, still there, still here, still there..." (132).

Aaron didn't read from "Morning in the Valley" last night, but I like this piece, so here's a little morsel from it. The scene is a Hot Springs resort where the narrator spots an attractive man, and then I skip forward to the piece's closing:

"...His body's an urban primitive canvas of torso-wide geometric tattoos; his pierced dick's weighed down by an alarmingly large silver ring.) I can see now that the extended pictographic lines across his back and shoulders are the wing bones of what I think is the skeleton of a pterodactyl, whose body of pure bones is suspended from the nape of this guy's neck.The archaic--no, the archaeological!--conjoins the contemporary....For the sake of compositional accuracy I pick up my books and towels and go looking for the illustrated man, to find out what the pterodactyl image really is. I want to ground my fancy in his imagination. But he's nowhere to be found, of course; he's gone from the valley, gone home. I'm left with the image that I've constructed, my ideogram, my remedial tattoo. It broadens my shoulders and aligns my back, a corrective wingspan of meditative synthesis. Taken from his torso it fits me like a fact.

I flex the page and stretch" (60-63).

One wonders "how does he do it?" How does he manage to write sentences that both soar with romantic excess and are unafraid of the exacto knife; sentences of desire and its extension to the world, a sharp edge so precise and dangerous?

Shurin's reading was followed by Anne Waldman accompanied at the end by Ambrose Bye on keyboards. Waldman performed "Red State, Blue State," which managed to be chock full of everything from Enron to Oppenheimer, Homeland Security, the Library of Alexandria, jackals, writing dances, and a wail about wanting to strangle Dick Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld. Another piece on manatees posited "manatees thinking archivally," an image that interested me. It's a pleasure to watch Waldman. She so inhabits her body and moves with(in) it.

9.13.2008

Small Press Traffic hosted the premier of Geyser! on Friday, September 12, 2008.

Geyser! takes place in a small town in Oregon where the short-lived TV series Geyser was filmed. Many locals appeared in the series and although the town's geyser hasn't gone off in 30 years, the town is hosting the convention of the Geyser fan club. Geyser, the TV show ended with the death of one of its stars, Lawrence Kansas, shot on location. His murder is unsolved until the close of Geyser! the play.

I arrived just before it all began. The cast was huge including:

Kala Milosevich as Kitty Potter, host of "Kitty Corner" (She purred her way through the piece in the most delicious southern accent! I could listen to her all day.)

Rex Ray as Rick Penny, host of "Rick Penny Among the Many" (Slippery, so slippery! Rick and Kitty are rival talk show hosts.)

Wayne Smith as Crimmins the beleaguered butler of a great star [Marjorie Cantrell]

Kevin Killian as Marjorie Cantrell, the first lady of the American theater (She hasn't left her home in thirty years. No make-up for this gal--just lots of sunscreen. She's photophobic!)

Gerald Corbin as Celebrity Stylist Maurice Anton (So smooth!)

Craig Goodman as Jared Oriole of Sherman Oaks (What was the line? --He's the sparkplug around which everything revolves. He's the organizer of the Geyser fan club. He's supposed to to be marrying Anouk at the fan club conference but instead marries Klanglar from Iceland.)

Jocelyn Saidenberg as Klanglar Gunnarsdottir, from Iceland (Her high-pitched voice and inverted syntax, those furs and glasses!--Jocelyn, was that really you?)

Laurie Reid as Mayor Constance Strode (So Palin-like in her glasses and suit with her hair swept up. But Constance has a heart and a long lost son.)

Colter Jacobsen plays Charlie Strode, Mayor Strode's son, a local fan and a clown, known as "Buttons" (Charlie dropped out of RISD to join the Radical Clown Collective, and needs to ask his mother for money to pin on the trees in the forest.)

Glen Helfand as Michael Carson, local fan and owner of a bed'n'breakfast place

Lindsay Wagner, a dangerously deluded fan is played by David Brazil (He and Tanya, aka "Anouk" draped around each other were fab.)

Taylor Brady as Gypsy Kincaide, truck driving fan (Who could have believed Taylor, one of the more articulate speakers out there could so convincingly play someone of so few words!)

Cliff Hengst as Bobo, clown leader (Charismatic as the leader of the radical clown collective. Cliff and Kevin (Marjorie) perform a duet at the play's close of "Send in the Clowns.")

Anne McGuire as Buttercup, a clown

Scott Hewicker as Dennis Quaid

Timken Hall was packed for the play and a good time was had by all. At some point in the middle of the play, there was a momentary lag, but it was only momentary. The theater was filled with bouts of raucous laughter. The cast obviously enjoyed themselves too. Kudos to all.

9.12.2008

Poets Theater Program Notes originally written for Small Press Traffic's Poets Theater Jamboree 2007Nick Robinson

By 1979 I was done with school and trying to figure out what to do with myself. Should I move to Vermont and join the Bread & Puppet Theater Company, as my college acting teacher had advised? Or get more involved with practice at the SF Zen Center, in spite of the martial tone that prevailed there. I applied for a Fulbright to study music in Bali, and while waiting for my free ticket in the mail I learned a few banjo tunes and cast about for a DIY theater project. I was living with Eileen Corder on York Street off 24th. Tinker Greene’s brother John had the Studio Eremos space in Project Artaud, and he let us rehearse and perform there for free, maybe we collected a little money and gave it to him but basically this was off the grid.

Carla Harryman and Steve Benson and I had done a one-night performance of Frank O’Hara’s Try! Try! at the Grand Piano, but Eileen and I had bigger ideas and wanted to do plays like we’d been doing them for the past 4 years in college in Michigan and Santa Cruz – real productions with rehearsals, direction, sets, costumes, lights, multiple performances. The poets were ready. I don’t remember having any trouble getting people to commit to 2 or 3 nights of rehearsal per week for a month or more, and a couple weekends of performances.

We’d show up at the studio around 7:30 and the actors would trickle in from their day jobs, or just from their days. Sometimes they’d already be in character. The dreamer, the bad boy, the cranky kid, the con man, the princess. Everybody seemed to have a shtick.

I didn’t have much idea of poets theater except I knew I didn’t want it to be like a staged poetry reading where everybody would just stand around and read their lines. I wanted something to happen between the actors, and I wanted that something to be expressed physically. So I leaned on what I’d learned from improvisational theater, much of it non-verbal – Viola Spolin theater games, 60s NYC experimental theater exercises a la Open Theater, El Teatro Campesino improvisational exuberance, Grotowskian plastique exercises – and I just started throwing it at the poor actors who probably wondered what any of it had to do with the script. But they stuck to it and let me lead them through all sorts of physical and vocal experiments. After a while they started to enjoy it, and then they started to play together. When I saw this I knew that I could start giving them lines from the script. As soon as they got their lines they’d stop playing together and start “acting”, which would be terrible, so I made the improvisations more structured and demanding so they wouldn’t be able to resume their habitual shtick, even though they wanted to. In this way, at times, the actors would surpass themselves.

Of course I tried to focus and score the improvs into a kind of physical/vocal/emotional subtext that bore an intentional relation to the text, but with texts like Third Man, Particle Arms, and Collateral (which Eileen directed) there was a lot of leeway for defining that relation.

The results? Mixed. There was a lot of excitement. We had big crowds. People laughed and cheered. Everybody learned something about the processes of making theater. Some of the writers plowed that knowledge back into their work which it continues to inform to this day.

It went on like that for a few years. When it ended for me (“… and so castles made of sand…”) I was still trying to figure out how to bring all the elements together in a dynamic and vital balance. Each time I watched a rehearsal or performance was a new chance to notice what was really happening between the actors and the text. That was the part I enjoyed the most. So it’s with pleasure that I join you for a viewing of selections from plays done by SF Poets Theater nearly thirty years ago.

Original manuscripts, correspondence, audio and video recordings, photos, programs, posters, and director’s notes to the productions are housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.

Nick Robinson lives in Albany, California, works as a librarian at UC Berkeley, and plays in several Bay Area string bands. His group the Ragtime Boyos will perform Sunday September 14 in the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention Cabaret from 3-6pm at Jupiter in Berkeley. Check out their video.

Clinton was suggesting that Obama's discourse is poetryand her own prose. By setting up this dichotomy--on theone hand, poetry as that which persuades or stuns orlure's an audience versus prose which, on the other hand,is the discourse of logic and policy and the stuff of action--sheconstructs their differences but also makes an implicit valuejudgement and assessment about the relationship of eachto the social world. Poetry is powerful, seductive (a formulationas old as Plato's banishment of poets from the polis in The Republic)while prose is practical. Such a formulation also points out thateach is shaped by and the instrument of ideology.

Clinton was also participating in the construction ofideologies about both. With this figure, she capitalizedon an existing belief that poetry is the stuff of sentimentand insufficient for governing, dangerous even. It ismore suited to the passions. While banishing poetryfrom a portion of the public sphere, she also assigns itother powers; its power of otherness. This is allentangled in a mess of exoticization and contradiction.And interestingly contains all kinds of reverberationsabout who actually gets to participate in the polis.Who counts.

There's more:

David Orr on The Poetry Foundation web site in anarticle entitled Poetry & Politics provides anotherexample of poetry's appearance in the public sphereas a way to launch his own examination of poetry'srelationship to politics:

"Shortly before Ohio's Democratic primary, TomBuffenbarger, the head of the machinists' unionand a supporter of Hillary Clinton, took to thestage at a Clinton rally in Youngstown to laythe wood to Barack Obama. 'Give me a break!' snarledBuffenbarger, 'I've got news for all the latte-drinking,Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babiescrowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last around against the Republican attack machine.'And then the union rep delivered his coup degrace: 'He's a poet, not a fighter!'"

In this quote, the speaker clearly disparages poetry,associating it with an elitist demographic andjuxtaposing it to the figure of the "fighter."McCain, near the end of his speech on Thursdaynight, invoked over and over this figure of thefighter, the warrior --get up and fight! Accordingto such rhetoric (which harkens back to the Romantics although if we take it back to the troubadours this becomes problematic as they eventuallycame from the "lower classes," and were peoplewho worked with their hands!),poetry is for lovers, not fighters.

Interestingly, in this quote too, poetry and Obamaare each figured as other and each gets alignedwith a particular class location: poetry (and Obama)elitist; prose (and the working class) the language of battle,and for the speaker above, the language of Hillary Clinton.Neither Clinton, nor McCain and his seven kitchen tables,nor even Obama currently qualifies as working class.

Poetry & Natinoalism: If I had time here, it would beworth thinking through poetry’s relationship tonationalism. And perhaps the connection betweencreative writing programs in primary schools anddemocracy as DG Meyers outlines it in TheElephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880.But there isn’t time at the moment!

Poetry, Politics & The San FranciscoBay Area:This discussion about poetryand its relationship to politics at thepresent political moment is interesting to me because I've been at workwriting about the San Francisco BayArea poetry in the 70s and 80s. Duringthis period, poetry's relationship to thesocial world is one of the central animatingdebates of these decades.

Here are a few quotes to illustrate:

"Writing itself is a form of action."(Ron Silliman. The New Sentence 4)

"My theme probably has most to dowith a very strong feeling that tellingstories actually has an effect on theworld, and that a relation is achievedbetween the one telling those storiesand her or his audience and history"(Bruce Boone. Century of Clouds 42).

"The political is an ordeal. Or rather,to undertake politics properly is toundergo an ordeal. Not poems then,but poetry and the dialectics ofwriting (Ron’s ‘Not this. What then?’):If the polis could serve as a site for theappearance of writing, might not writingserve as preparation for the polis?"(Lyn Hejinian, The Grand Piano Part 2 75).

In 1988 an article entitled, "Aesthetic Tendencyand the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto"is published in the journal Social Text. Ron Silliman,Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson,Bob Perelman, and Barett Wattenco-authored this article and constructedit as a direct response to the types ofcriticism lobbed at this group of writersfrequently identified as Language Writersthough they themselves problematize thisidentification (for example in their refusal touse the term Language writing until thetwelfth page of the article) while valorizingthe group as community. Despite theproblematic nature of group identity,these authors articulate themselves as a"community of writers who read eachother’s work"(261). The article states"we are arguing for the significance of agroup against the canonical individualof the ‘expressivist’ tendency, itself asocial movement" (273), one that isnaturalized so to appear to "providean ideology of no ideology" (264).The authors provide examples ofthe problematic construction of atranscendent, isolated individualproffering personal experience ina variety of poems and assertthat in such cases, "authorial ‘voice’lapses into melodrama in a socialallegory where the author is precludedfrom effective action by his or her veryemotions" (265). It is "this kind ofworked-over accounting of ‘experience,’we think, [that] is primarily responsiblefor the widespread contemporaryreception of poetry as nice but irrelevant" (264).Such poetry, this article argues, accounts forthe public perception that poetry isornamental but irrelevant in the social world.

In his introduction to the magazine Soup in 1981,editor Steve Abbott offers a brief descriptionof New Narrative. He writes: "New Narrative islanguage conscious but arises out of specific socialand political concerns of specific communities...It stresses the enabling role of content in determiningform rather than stressing form as independentor separate from its social origins and goals."

Robert Glückwrites:"Whole areas of my experience, especiallygay experience, were not admitted tothis utopia [of language writing],partly because the mainstreamreflected a resoundingly coherentimage of myself back to me–animage so unjust that it amountedto a tyranny that I could not turnmy back on. We had beendisastrously described bythe mainstream–a namingwhose most extreme (thoughnot uncommon) expression wasphysical violence. Political agencyinvolved at least a provisionallystable identity....Bruce [Boone] andI turned to each other to see if wecould come up with a betterrepresentation–not in order tosatisfy movement pieties or tobe political, but in order to be.We (eventually we were gay, lesbianand working-class writers) could notlet narration go ("Long Note onNew Narrative" 26-27).

Class: And then there are issues of class and itsrelationship to poetry and the Bay Areawriting community. Dodie Bellamy takesup the issue of class in a post on her blog.

This excerpt is from my review, forthcomingin Crayon, of Mike Amnasan’s novel Liar:

"In a recent email exchange about class andthe San Francisco Bay Area writing scene,Amnasan wrote:'To talk about class issues was consideredan attempt at one-ups-man-ship, tryingto get special attention through an illegitimatemeans that no one was going to take seriously.A lot of middle class writers felt that if aworking class person learned from thebooks and resources that they themselveshad learned from they became middleclass with the same privileges....I thinkthe basic attitude among a lot of languagewriters was that the social class of anindividual had become too hard todistinguish with all the different kindsof labor and vocations people now hadso that class was no longer valid ascriteria in regard to individuals andso it was simply no longer interesting'(June 16, 2007 email from Mike Amnasan).

So, these are just a few quotes that suggest someof the contentions around politics, poetryand social engagement, and class.Just the tip of the iceberg!